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The spread of corporate board quota legislation is studied in light of diffusion theory. Mechanisms of diffusion, path dependency and critical junctures can contribute to explaining the spread of policy reforms, such as the corporate board quota legislation. The empirical section describes the Norwegian reform process and maps out the ongoing European and global reform processes and debates. Seven countries, in addition to Norway, have in recent years initiated legal reforms and adopted corporate board quota rules: Spain, Iceland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Malaysia. However, the debates over the introduction of parallel legislation extend further, and are a burning issue in several other Western European countries, as well as globally. The discussion addresses why this policy spreads, and tries to understand the complexities of factors that have led to the diffusion of public debate and legal reform of corporate board quota.

Lack of women in boardrooms and management has been a common feature of corporate and agricultural sectors in Norway. In both sectors, quota reforms have been implemented in order to change this situation. This chapter analyses the reasons given for applying gender quotas. While public limited companies were enforced by law to elect a minimum 40 per cent women or men to their boards in 2008, the board of the Federation of Norwegian Agricultural Co-operatives (FNAC) voluntarily decided that a minimum of 40 per cent women or men should be represented in their boards by 2009. How could it be that the agricultural cooperatives introduced this voluntarily, while the business corporations were to be forced by legislation? Public documents, governmental papers, media texts and interview data are analysed to identify and compare the reasoning for gender board quotas. The comparison sheds light on our understanding of the boardroom quota as more complex than simply to deal with gender equality. Traditional gender equality arguments did play a role, but in different ways, articulations and emphasis. More pragmatic reasoning played a role. In FNAC, we saw that the process of organisation-building and modernisation played an important role in the decision to voluntarily introduce gender quotas on boards. Within the corporate sector there were no advocates for introducing gender quotas before profitability arguments came to the fore, but even though such arguments were acceptable to the corporate sector, they did not have the same effect in terms of getting volunteer support for gender quotas.

The recent reform in Norway on the gender composition of boards of directors in public firms, requiring boards to have at least 40 per cent of each gender, inevitably raises general questions concerning state regulation of property rights. What are the normative limits to state intervention? And more practically: how far could and should such interventions go? The question may be approached from several angles. The line followed here is to look into recent history in two Scandinavian countries – the most state-friendly of all existing democracies – to explore the differences between political interventions which have gained a high degree of legitimacy and those that failed or were never put into practice. In the discussion, both economic efficiency and normative concerns are evoked. Successful reforms introducing employee representatives into health and security committees, as well as to the boards of enterprises, are contrasted to the failed cases of quasi-nationalization of commercial banks in Norway and the wage-earner funds in Sweden. These results throw light on possible democratic justification and political viability of the gender quota reform.

The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the use of social media (SM) and its influence for increasing students’ participation in the quota reform movement at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The revised technology acceptance model (TAM) was used to formulate this research’s hypotheses. A survey was administered to obtain data about students’ intention to use SM. The survey consisted of a set of questions based upon the revised TAM model. A total of 498 surveys were distributed and 304 students responded to it; hence, response rate was of 61.04%. A regression and single way ANOVA were conducted to test the hypotheses.

The results indicate that most of the students use SM for academic purposes and to get connected with friends. Among the social networking tools, Facebook is the most widely used by the respondents. Findings supported that perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of SM affect student’s intention to increase participation in the quota reform movement. There were no significant relationships between gender and politics with the use of SM.

A sample of students from Dhaka University was taken and the sample size was small. As a result, the findings of this study cannot be generalized in other settings. SM has a positive effect in the societies where change happens through collective actions.

Why and how students use SM has been widely discussed over the available literature, but students’ intention to use for it for social movements has not been studied. This study has made an effort to empirically examine the use of SM in the context of the quota reform movement in Bangladesh.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolution of China's securities market regulation from 1980 to 2007 and the dual role of the government in this process.

When the government is simultaneously the owner and regulator of the securities market, the evolution of securities market regulation follows a path of compulsory institutional change. China's Government authorities have played a dual role in this process by acting both as the securities market regulator and the controlling owner of the stock exchanges. The paper uses the evolution of China's securities market regulation from 1980 to 2007 to illustrate this theoretical framework.

Using the case of China, this paper provides unique evidence of how securities regulation evolves in response to government direction and supervision if the government is both the owner and the regulator of the securities market.

The paper offers insight into issues of securities market regulation in China and other emerging markets.

Most current modeling approaches identify very small gains from trade reform. In this chapter, we examine recent developments in the literature to assess whether standard modeling approaches are mis-specifying, understating, or overstating the gains from trade reform. Key areas where the impacts of trade barrier reduction appear to be understated include the measurement of barriers; the aggregation of these barriers; process productivity gains, particularly those resulting from reallocation of resources between firms; product quality improvements and expansion of product variety; factor supply; and investment of gains from trade.

This paper aims to examine the impact of female board directorship on the extent of earnings management.

The research hypotheses have been tested using both univariate and multivariate analyzes based on a sample of 198 firm-year observations from closely-held family firms listed on the SBF 120 over the period 2010–2018.

The empirical results first indicate that female board participation reduces the level of earnings management. When looking at women positions in the companies’ boardrooms, the authors reveal that the negative linkage between female board directorship and earnings management remains constant for independent female directors while the opposite holds for their family-affiliated counterparts. Further, the gender quota reform is shown to mitigate the adverse relationship between gender-diverse corporate boards and the extent of earnings management. These results seem sound, as they hold unchanged for the several measures of, both, boardroom gender diversity and earnings management used in the empirical study. In a supplementary analysis, the authors provide evidence that the association between the presence of women directors on the companies’ boards and earnings management depends, in a different way, on the size of the audit firm in a joint auditing context.

The country and the period considered in this paper are noteworthy characteristics that enhance the value of this research. The present study is relevant because it examines the relationship between female boardroom participation and earnings management using a homogeneous sample of family-owned and -managed companies within which shareholders and board members share identical motives for manipulating earnings in one of the leading countries in the world with regard to family ownership dominance (i.e. France). Moreover, this paper is considered to be very timely, as it explores, contrarily to previous related studies, the years following the implementation of a mandatory gender quota reform in one of the less available countries, to date, that have amended a gender quota law. To the knowledge, besides France, there are a few markets (Norway, Belgium, Finland and Iceland) that have implemented such legislation.

In this chapter, we have analysed the relationship between the proportion of women on board of directors and firm performance in Norway and Denmark. These countries are, in an international context, considered similar in many respects. However, during 2002–2007, the two countries experienced quite different developments regarding the gender diversity on companies' boards, caused by the Norwegian board reform affecting public limited firms. These changes increase the relevancy for analysing and comparing the relationship between gender diversity and firm performance in the two countries. The results for Denmark reveal no significant relationships between the proportion of women on boards and firm performance. As there was no quota policy in place in Denmark in this period, the proportion of women on boards has been quite constant. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that we observe no significant relationships. The results for Norway reveal first a positive relationship between the proportion of women on boards of directors and firm performance. This relationship does hold after controlling for a wide set of firm characteristics. Can this be explained by the quota? No, our robustness analyses suggest not. The results indicate that the short-term relationship between gender diversity and firm performance is negligible. Neither for public limited firms nor for limited firms, can firm performance during this period really be attributed to women on boards. Thus, from a gender equalisation point of view, it appears that one has achieved increased gender diversity on Norwegian boards, without affecting firm performance.

This paper aims to appraise the effectiveness of gender quotas in breaking the glass ceiling for women on boards (WoBs) in companies that are legally obliged to comply with quotas (listed companies and state-owned companies, LP) and in those that are not (unlisted companies and nonstate-owned companies, NLNP). Furthermore, it investigates the glass cliff phenomenon, according to which women are more likely to be appointed to apical positions in underperforming companies.

A balanced panel data of the top 116 Italian companies by total assets, which are present in both 2010 and 2017, is used for estimating ANOVA tests across sectors and fixed-effects panel regression models.

WoBs significantly increased in both the LP and the NLNP companies, and this increase was greater in the financial sector. Furthermore, the relationship between the percentage of WoBs and firm performance is not linear but depends on the financial corporate health. Specifically, the situation in which a woman ascends to a leadership position in challenging circumstances where the risk of failure is high (glass cliff phenomenon) is only present in companies with the lowest performance in the sample, in other words, when negative values of Roe and negative or zero values of Roa occur together.

These findings have relevant policy implications that encourage the adoption of gender quotas even in specific top positions, such as CEO or president, as this could lead to a “double spillover effect” both vertically, that is, in other job positions, and horizontally, toward other companies not targeted by quotas. Practical interventions to support women in glass cliff positions, on the other hand, relate to the extent of supervisor mentoring and support to prevent women from leaving director roles and strengthen their chances for career advancement.

The authors explore the ability of gender quotas to break through the glass ceiling in companies that are not legally obliged to do so, and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, for the first time, the glass cliff phenomenon in the Italian context.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a first impact assessment of the Italian quota law in order to explore whether “gender equality by law” contributes to redefining, albeit in part, consolidating and establishing positions of power and decision making. The paper analyses these dynamics by focusing on a specific economic sector, the banking sector. The analysis strives to determine: whether binding quotas are giving rise to an apparent enforcement by building up new distortionary equilibria (such as new forms of horizontal segregation); what extent the financial crisis has impacted on the rhetoric of female representation, and whether it has pushed towards a “regenerative” organizational change aimed at achieving a more inclusive and egalitarian image.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the theoretical and empirical debate on gender diversity and quota impact. Section 3 reports macro and micro data on the italian system; Section 4 describes the Italian banking system and gives a first impact assessment on Italian banks of the mandatory gender quotas in Italy (the so-called “Golfo-Mosca law,” named after MPs who proposed the law); some qualitative considerations are carried out on the reactions of Italian banks to the financial crisis in terms of “bridge policies” aimed at corresponding to a higher demand of customer satisfaction and fairness. Section 5 concludes and summarizes the finding of the study.

The Italian banking system is not so dramatically ranked among the EU countries as in the recent past. The gender rebalance in management bodies could be considered rather satisfying. If we compare ten-year-old findings, the number of women on board of directors has tripled. But data clearly show a dichotomy due to significant differences between listed and non-listed banks. In non-listed banks, women are still relegated to an under-represented position, reaching only 13 percent on boards of directors (as against 33 percent in listed banks). The data confirm the results found in non-financial sector that women are significantly better represented on audit boards. In accordance with all previous studies, no relevant changes can be noticed on key-decision roles: no CEOs or Directors general are women in listed banks, and women are always more represented in non-executive functions.

The paper analyses the law experience in Italy as a significant case study by proving that rules such as temporary binding gender quotas (introduced by law in 2011) can be useful, but not always enough to remove blocking or distortive factors in organizational ladders.